Angela Merkel met Vladimir Putin for the first time in Moscow in 2 years, her last visit there being a brief visit she made in 2015 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Victory In Europe.

Apart from that one meeting, which it was impossible politically for Merkel to avoid, Merkel’s visit to Moscow today is her first visit there since her negotiation with Putin in February 2015, which took place in the run-up to the signing of the Minsk Agreement.

Merkel has avoided to Moscow since then, and has signalled her disapproval of visits there by other German politicians.

Merkel’s visit to Moscow is supposed to be taking place in the run-up to the G20 summit in July in Germany,which Merkel will be hosting.

This is an excuse than than a reason for the visit. Even if it is true that Merkel is busy contacting G20 leaders in preparation for the summit, that did not require her to go to Moscow to meet Putin there.

Vladimir Putin and Angela Merkel are by a very considerable distance the two most powerful leaders in Europe. Each of them leads what are by a very considerable distance the two most powerful countries in Europe. Putin and Merkel are now also the two most long lasting leaders of any of the major European states. Putin has been de facto leading Russia since Boris Yeltsin appointed him Prime Minister in August 1999. Merkel has been Germany’s Chancellor since 2005.

Putin and Merkel have met frequently with each other, and have got to know each other very well. Each speaks the other’s language, making it possible for them to speak directly to each other without interpreters. Both are exceptionally skilled politicians, with a profound grasp of the politics of their respective countries. Both are good managers and formidable negotiators with an eye for detail. Over the years that they have known each other, they have gained a wary respect for each other.

That respect is however coloured by mutual dislike. In his usual way Putin never speaks of it. Merkel however has spoken of it often, and Putin is of course aware of some of the deeply unpleasant things she has said about him.

Though the two dislike each other – a fact very obvious in the tense body language of their meetings – circumstances oblige them to work together, though neither finds it a pleasant experience. Merkel admitted as much during her joint conference with Putin today, when she confirmed she was meeting Putin out of necessity and not from choice

I am always of the view that even if there are serious differences of opinion in some areas, talks must continue. You must carry on, because otherwise you fall into silence and there is less and less understanding

The same Reuters report which reports these words, also refers to their tense body language during the news conference

Their body language suggested tensions: their facial expressions as they spoke to reporters were stern, and the two leaders barely looked at each other.

That Putin and Merkel nonetheless often succeed in achieving common ground on subjects like Nord Stream 2 with each other despite their mutual dislike is a sign of their professionalism, which is of course a reason why they have been leaders of their respective countries for so long.

Underpinning their mutual dislike are profound differences.

Though Putin and Merkel are often referred to as conservatives, in reality that does neither of them justice.

Though he in many of his professed attitudes Putin is a conservative, he is also the leader of a dynamic and purposeful government which in the years he has been in power has transformed Russia, changing it more completely than any other country during the same period apart from China.

Merkel is more truly conservative in the sense that she sees herself as essentially Germany’s caretaker, preserving the German political and economic system unchanged from the way she found it. Where Putin’s policies are marked by dynamism and change, her policies can be best described as immobilism bordering on stagnation.

However Merkel has also increasingly become the gatekeeper of Europe’s neoliberal order, which in its effects is anything but conservative.

The most important fact about today’s meeting is its venue.

It is barely conceivable that Putin or Merkel – who are in regular communication with each other – were expecting to hear anything from the other which they had not heard before. Bloomberg has written a colourful account of their joint press conference and of the different positions they took on the Ukrainian crisis. However these were simply restatements of long established positions, which neither Putin nor Merkel would have expected the other to change.

On the sanctions issue highlighted by Bloomberg, Russian Finance Minister Siluanov had already said before Merkel’s visit in an interview with the German business newspaper Handelsblatt that Russia expects the sanctions to stay.

For what it’s worth, on certain contentious points which have arisen recently between Ukraine and Russia, Merkel if anything appeared to side with Russia. Thus she rejected Ukrainian suggestions that the Minsk Agreement be scrapped or rewritten, or that the OSCE monitors in eastern Ukraine be replaced by UN peacekeepers. I doubt anyone sees anything of significant in this.

The key point about Merkel going to Moscow to meet with Putin there is that it shows that she now accepts that Putin is there to stay, and will be there for a long time.

It was not to signal any change of policy that Merkel went to Moscow. It was to acknowledge the reality that Putin’s hold on power is secure.

Amidst the ocean of words the Western media has written about how Putin supposedly meddles in Western politics, and how he supposedly engineered Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 and is trying to engineer Angela Merkel’s defeat this year, it is completely overlooked that in reality it was the West which in 2014 tried to overthrow him.

That was why the West imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014: in the expectation that the hurt the West thought they would cause through the sanctions would provoke a backlash against Putin in Russia, which would lead to his overthrow.

Merkel was fully on board with this agenda. Back in the winter of 2014 the BND – Germany’s intelligence agency – told her that if sanctions were imposed on Russia Putin would have no choice but to comply with the West’s demands or face being overthrown in an oligarch-led coup.

Three years later no-one any longer believes that.

Since refusing to talk to Russia – as Merkel says – is not an option, that means talking to Putin. If he insists that means meeting him in Moscow, then Merkel is enough of a realist to know that she has no choice but to go.

Understanding the Holodomor and why Russia says nothing

One of the charges that nationalist Ukrainians often lodge against their Russian neighbors is that the Russian government has never acknowledged or formally apologized to Ukraine for the “Holodomor” that took place in Ukraine in 1932-1933. This was a man-made famine that killed an estimated seven to 10 million Ukrainians , though higher estimates claim 12.5 million and lower ones now claim 3.3 million.

No matter what the total was, it amounts to a lot of people that starved to death. The charge that modern-day Russia ought to apologize for this event is usually met with silence, which further enrages those Ukrainians that believe that this issue must be resolved by the Russian acknowledgement of responsibility for it. Indeed, the prime charge of these Ukrainians is that the Russians committed a genocide against the Ukrainian people. This is a claim Russia denies.

To the outside observer who does not know this history of Russia and Ukraine’s relationship, and who does not know or understand the characteristics of the Soviet Union, this charge seems as simple and laid out as that of the Native Americans or the blacks demanding some sort of recompense or restitution for the damages inflicted on these societies through conquest and / or slavery. But we discovered someone who had family connections involved in the Holodomor, and who offers her own perspective, which is instructive in why perhaps the Russian Federation does not say anything about this situation.

Scene in Kharkiv with dead from the famine 1932-33 lying along the street.

I can’t speak for Russia and what it does and doesn’t recognize. I can speak for myself.

I am a great-granddaughter of a “Kulak” (кулак), or well-to-do peasant, who lived close to the Russia/Ukraine border.

The word “кулак” means “fist” in Russian, and it wasn’t a good thing for a person to be called by this label. A кулак was an exploiter of peasants and a class enemy of the new state of workers and poor peasants. In other words, while under Communism, to be called a кулак was to bring a death sentence upon yourself.

At some point, every rural class enemy, every peasant who wasn’t a member of a collective farm was eliminated one way or another.

Because Ukraine has very fertile land and the Ukrainian style of agriculture often favors individual farms as opposed to villages, there is no question that many, many Ukrainian peasants were considered class enemies like my great grandfather, and eliminated in class warfare.

I have no doubt that class warfare included starvation, among other things.

The catch? My great grandfather was an ethnic Russian living in Russia. What nationality were the communists who persecuted and eventually shot him? They were of every nationality there was (in the Soviet Union), and they were led by a Ukrainian, who was taking orders from a Georgian.

Now, tell me, why I, a descendant of an unjustly killed Russian peasant, need to apologize to the descendants of the Ukrainians who killed him on the orders of a Georgian?

What about the Russian, Kazakh golodomor (Russian rendering of the same famine)? What about the butchers, who came from all ethnicities? Can someone explain why it’s only okay to talk about Ukrainian victims and Russian persecutors? Why do we need to rewrite history decades later to convert that brutal class war into an ethnic war that it wasn’t?

Ethnic warfare did not start in Russia until after WWII, when some ethnicities were accused of collaboration with the Nazis and brutal group punishments were implemented. It was all based on class up to that time.

The communists of those years were fanatically internationalist. “Working people of all countries, unite!” was their slogan and they were fanatical about it.

As for the crimes of Communism, Russia has been healing this wound for decades, and Russia’s government has made its anticommunist position very clear.

This testimony is most instructive. First, it points out information that the charge of the Holodomor as “genocide!” neatly leaves out. In identifying the internationalist aspects of the Soviet Union, Ukraine further was not a country identified as somehow worthy of genocidal actions. Such a thought makes no sense, especially given the great importance of Ukraine as the “breadbasket” of the Soviet Union, which it was.

Secondly, it shows a very western-style of “divide to conquer” with a conveniently incendiary single-word propaganda tool that is no doubt able to excite any Ukrainian who may be neutral to slightly disaffected about Russia, and then after that, all Ukrainians are now victims of the mighty evil overlords in Moscow.

How convenient is this when the evil overlords in Kyiv don’t want their citizens to know what they are doing?

“This day will go down in history as the day of the creation of an autocephalous Orthodox church in Ukraine… This is the day of the creation of the church as an independent structure… What is this church? It is a church without Putin. It is a church without Kirill, without prayer for the Russian authorities and the Russian army.”

But as long as Russia is made the “problem”, millions of scandalized Ukrainians will not care what this new Church actually does or teaches, which means it is likely to teach just about anything.

Russia had its own Holodomor. The history of the event shows that this was a result of several factors – imposed socialist economics on a deeply individualized form of agrarian capitalism (bad for morale and worse for food production), really inane centralized planning of cropland use, and a governmental structure that really did not exist to serve the governed, but to impose an ideology on people who really were not all that interested in it.

Personal blame might well lay with Stalin, a Georgian, but the biggest source of the famine lay in the structures imposed under communism as a way of economic strategy. This is not Russia’s fault. It is the economic model that failed.

Having initially snubbed Judge Emmet Sullivan’s order to release the original 302 report from the Michael Flynn interrogation in January 2017, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has finally produced the heavily redacted document, just hours before sentencing is due to be handed down.

The memo – in full below – details then-national security adviser Michael Flynn’s interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, and shows Flynn was repeatedly asked about his contacts with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and in each instance, Flynn denied (or did not recall) any such conversations.

The agents had transcripts of Flynn’s phone calls to Russian Ambassador Kislyak, thus showing Flynn to be lying.

Flynn pleaded guilty guilty last December to lying to the FBI agents about those conversations with Kislyak.

The redactions in the document seem oddly placed but otherwise, there is nothing remarkable about the content…

Aside from perhaps Flynn’s incredulity at the media attention…

Flynn is set to be sentenced in that federal court on Tuesday.

Of course, as Christina Laila notes, the real crime is that Flynn was unmasked during his phone calls to Kislyak and his calls were illegally leaked by a senior Obama official to the Washington Post.

Don’t Laugh : It’s Giving Putin What He Wants

The BBC has published an article titled “How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about the Kremlin’s latest addition to its horrifying deadly hybrid warfare arsenal: comedy.

The article is authored by Olga Robinson, whom the BBC, unhindered by any trace of self-awareness, has titled “Senior Journalist (Disinformation)”. Robinson demonstrates the qualifications and acumen which earned her that title by warning the BBC’s audience that the Kremlin has been using humor to dismiss and ridicule accusations that have been leveled against it by western governments, a “form of trolling” that she reports is designed to “deliberately lower the level of discussion”.

Turns out jokes are a Russian disinformation conspiracy.Is nothing safe? What will those barbarian Others think of next? Weaponizing our tears? https://t.co/0CFcTL65q0

“Russia’s move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively recent phenomenon,” Robinson explains, without speculating as to why Russians might have suddenly begun laughing at their western accusers. She gives no consideration to the possibility that the tightly knit alliance of western nations who suddenly began hysterically shrieking about Russia two years ago have simply gotten much more ridiculous and easier to make fun of during that time.

Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the emergence of a demented media environment wherein everything around the world from French protests to American culture wars to British discontent with the European Union gets blamed on Russia without any facts or evidence. Wherein BBC reporters now correct guests and caution them against voicing skepticism of anti-Russia narratives because the UK is in “an information war” with that nation. Wherein the same cable news Russiagate pundit can claim that both Rex Tillerson’s hiringandhis later firing were the result of a Russian conspiracy to benefit the Kremlin. Wherein mainstream outlets can circulate blatantly false information about Julian Assange and unnamed “Russians” and then blame the falseness of that reporting on Russian disinformation. Wherein Pokemon Go, cutesy Facebook memes and $4,700 in Google ads are sincerely cited as methods by which Hillary Clinton’s $1.2 billion presidential campaign was outdone. Wherein conspiracy theories that Putin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government have been blaring on mainstream headline news for two years with absolutely nothing to show for it to this day.

Nope, the only possibility is that the Kremlin suddenly figured out that humor is a thing.

The fact of the matter is that humorous lampooning of western establishment Russia narratives writes itself. The hypocrisy is so cartoonish, the emotions are so breathlessly over-the-top, the stories so riddled with plot holes and the agendas underlying them so glaringly obvious that they translate very easily into laughs. I myself recently authored a satire piece that a lot of people loved and which got picked up by numerous alternative media outlets, and all I did was write down all the various escalations this administration has made against Russia as though they were commands being given to Trump by Putin. It was extremely easy to write, and it was pretty damn funny if I do say so myself. And it didn’t take any Kremlin rubles or dezinformatsiya from St Petersburg to figure out how to write it.

“Most comedy programmes on Russian state television these days are anodyne affairs which either do not touch on political topics, or direct humour at the Kremlin’s perceived enemies abroad,” Robinson writes, which I found funny since I’d just recently read an excellent essay by Michael Tracey titled “Why has late night swapped laughs for lusting after Mueller?”

“If the late night ‘comedy’ of the Trump era has something resembling a ‘message,’ it’s that large segments of the nation’s liberal TV viewership are nervously tracking every Russia development with a passion that cannot be conducive to mental health – or for that matter, political efficacy,” Tracey writes, documenting numerous examples of the ways late night comedy now has audiences cheering for a US intelligence insider and Bush appointee instead of challenging power-serving media orthodoxies as programs like The Daily Show once did.

If you wanted the opposite of “anodyne affairs”, it would be comedians ridiculing the way all the establishment talking heads are manipulating their audiences into supporting the US intelligence community and FBI insiders. It would be excoriating the media environment in which unfathomably powerful world-dominating government agencies are subject to less scrutiny and criticism than a man trapped in an embassy who published inconvenient facts about those agencies. It certainly wouldn’t be the cast of Saturday Night Live singing “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to a framed portrait if Robert Mueller wearing a Santa hat. It doesn’t get much more anodyne than that.

Russia makes fun of western establishment narratives about it because those narratives are so incredibly easy to make fun of that they are essentially asking for it, and the nerdy way empire loyalists are suddenly crying victim about it is itself more comedy. When Guardian writer Carole Cadwalladr began insinuating that RT covering standard newsworthy people like Julian Assange and Nigel Farage was a conspiracy to “boost” those people for the advancement of Russian agendas instead of a news outlet doing the thing that news reporting is, RT rightly made fun of her for it. Cadwalladr reacted to RT’s mockery with a claim that she was a victim of “attacks”, instead of the recipient of perfectly justified ridicule for circulating an intensely moronic conspiracy theory.